Monica was on her feet. ‘I’m going to fetch Grace and take her home. I thought this was a good place for her to spend part of the year, but I think perhaps London is safer after all.’ At the door she stopped and turned back to Perez. ‘Don’t I know you?’

‘I met you here,’ he said. ‘At a party for the opening of your exhibition.’ He paused. ‘My partner was an artist. Fran Hunter.’ He was pleased with himself because the words came easily.

Monica nodded as if she recognized the name and then she left.

Later they ended up in Lerwick, in the house by the water that Perez hadn’t quite got round to letting out. He’d arranged for Cassie to stay one more night with her father. Perez wasn’t sure exactly what time it was. Or even what day. He’d be glad to be back in Ravenswick with just Cassie’s chat as the background to his thoughts, and the routine of getting her to school and himself to work to keep him straight. But now they were drinking coffee, and Willow had managed to find an unopened bottle of single malt from the top of her bag. There were fulmars sailing past the window and no trace here in the town of fog. And then he saw the Hjatland, the big ferry to Aberdeen, pass down the Sound and so he knew it was just past seven o’clock in the evening. In twelve hours the three visitors from Sletts would be back on the Scottish mainland. He wondered how things would be between Polly and Marcus. Would the man give up his glamorous older woman, and would the timid librarian be able to forgive him? She seemed to have a knack of seeing the world as she wanted it to be. He thought it would be easier for Ian Longstaff to come to terms with his wife’s murder now that there was some resolution.

‘That scheme of Eleanor’s seems an awful lot of bother to have gone to.’ Willow was sitting on the floor and her long hair fell over her knees.

‘She was desperate,’ Perez said. ‘As Monica said, her company was on the verge of bankruptcy. She needed something new and dramatic to make the show a hit. Persuading a group of graduates that they’d seen the ghost of a child who’d died in 1930 would do that. And maybe Eleanor saw the hoax as a kind of retribution. She thought that Ian had been unfair in the way he treated her after losing the baby.’

‘They must have had a weird kind of relationship.’ Sandy seemed dreamy and lost in thought. By now the lack of sleep was catching up with them all. Perhaps he was thinking about his Unst school teacher and planning another meeting with her.